Edward Skidelsky nails it: the smarmy bureaucratic coercion of the word “inappropriate”.
From Arts & Letters Daily, in the blogroll.
Pagan Studies Call for Papers, AAR 2010
This post is for anyone who has not already seen the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s call for papers for next year’s AAR meeting in Atlanta posted on some e-list or other.
For details on paper submission, see the AAR’s page for that meeting. Note that some information will not be posted until later in December.
The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group invites papers that address one of the following topics:
1. For session with Men’s Studies in Religion Group, Pagan Masculinities: Male Identity, Gender Injustice and Power Relations. Who are the Pagan men, how is their understanding of masculinity constituted, and how are they affected by the emphasis on the feminine in Pagan spirituality?
2. Paganism, Ethnicity and Ultra-Nationalism. The Right has increased representation in the European Parliament and some of those elected are Pagans with concerns about boundaries, immigration and ethnicities. We welcome papers that investigate this growing phenomenon and the contentious issues that arise from it.
3. Idolatry and Tangible Sacrality: The Conversation Continues. This panel generated such excellent discussion at the 2009 meeting that we felt it important to explore it further.
4. For session with the New Religious Movements Group, papers on African-inspired religious traditions, such as Santeria, Vodun, Yoruba, and Candomble,
especially as those in the southeastern United States.
Blog It and They Will Come. But Why?
Real search-engine queries that brought Web visitors to this blog:
Is Depeche Mode synonymous with homosexuality? [I don’t know; I missed the 80s.]
Booty shaking videos of Muslim women
Arvol Looking Horse fraud youtube [he is an American Indian activist on the “cultural appropriation” issue]
make shinto priest hat
food placed in creek for religion
[I have made food offerings at a crossroads, but in the creek??]
intercessory prayer for halloween sacrifice
Of course, now the Googlebot will index all those terms here . . .
It’s Thanksgiving-Put Your Mask On
I have a long-standing interest in masks and masked ritual, going back to when I helped Evan John Jones with Sacred Mask Sacred Dance
So consider than on the East Coast a century ago, Thanksgiving (or at least the last Thursday in November), rather than Halloween, was the time for masking and trick-or-treating.
Thanksgiving itself was a sort of irregular, off-and-on holiday until it was deliberately fixed to mark the start of the Christmas shopping season during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
Blogging Hermits
What is it with blogging hermits—or quasi-hermits?
Would Henry David Thoreau have had a blog? I am sure of it. Anyone who would edit his autobiography so that two years of experience fit neatly into one literary year has demonstrated the capability of self-romanticizing that blogging requires.
Sunday’s Denver Post had a long piece about a man named Daniel Suelo who lives in a cave outside Moab, Utah, never handles money, dumpster-dives, etc.—and blogs about his life, courtesy of the long-suffering local librarians. (Somebody tell him that white-on-black fonts offer poor readability.)
I can see Diogenes the Cynic updating his blog at the public library too: “inabarrel.blogspot.com.”
And there are others.
Lately I have been reading As The Crow Flies, who offers this thought:
If you want to be alone, it’s important to know, you can never get far enough away; humans and their noise producing machines are everywhere. One thought that helps me, is to think of myself as an alien dropped off on a planet of apes. Then I can just sit back and enjoy the show—like going to the zoo.
But the post that sold me on her blog is this one.
I cannot get it out of my mind. Maybe it’s because M. and I often go several days without talking to anyone else in person (not counting email). Without her (and the dogs), I would soon be wondering the same thing.
Cross-posted to Southern Rockies Nature Blog.
J.K. Rowlings’ Effect on Our Language
Recently M. and I started to experiment with geocaching. Since our rural home is adjacent to national forest land and located just off a designated Scenic Byway, it is a fertile spot—there must be a dozen or more caches within five miles.
But what I noticed when reading geocaching sites and forums is that a particular term is used for people who are out and about but who themselves are not geocachers. It is important that the caches themselves be concealed from these people.
The term used for such people, of course, begins with “m.”
Pagans among Suspects in Priest’s Murder
(Welcome, vistors from The Wild Hunt. Stick around, click a few links.)
A Russian Orthodox priest is murdered in his Moscow church, and suspicion falls both on Muslims and on Russian Pagans.
But note the titles of his books.
We know too much about people who shout “Allah Akbar” and then pull the trigger, but why the Pagans? Why bring them into the discussion?
Paganism in Russia is somewhat like what my Anglosphere readers are used to, but there are significant differences. Russian Pagans are more likely to have their own line of “blood and soil” rhetoric and to claim that they represent the true spirituality of their people, which puts them in direct conflict with the Orthodox Church, which itself has made that same claim since the 10th century.
The Russian anthropologist Victor Shnirelman is one scholar who has written a lot of on the topic. Being Jewish (as I understand), he is particularly sensitive to whiffs of antisemitism, as in this article, “Russian Neopagan Myths and Antisemitism.”
The Pomegranate has published several articles on Russian and other Eastern European Paganisms. Abstracts are available online.
Kaarina Aitamurto, “Russian Paganism and the Issue of Nationalism: A Case Study of the Circle of Pagan Tradition,” 8:2 (2006) 184-210.
Adrian Ivakhiv, “Nature and Ethnicity in East European Paganism: An Environmental Ethic of the Religious Right?” 17:2 (2005) 194-225.
Victor Shnirelman, “Ancestral Wisdom and Ethnic Nationalism: A View from Eastern Europe,” 9:1 (2007) 41-61.
In Which We Use ‘the I-Word’ at the AAR
Attendance at this year’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting was down somewhat, an AAR staff member told me: about 5,000 instead of 7,000-8,000. He attributed the drop to the economy, not to the fact that the meeting was held in Montreal. I certainly heard no complaints about the venue.
Although I spent the Saturday being a tourist of magic, I was still able to make the main Paganism-related sessions.
The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group had three sessions, and they were well-attended by AAR standards, with more than fifty people at each one.
Our shared session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group went well. Suzanne Owen took on the whole question of how “indigenous” is employed in a paper called “Indigenous Religious Expressions? Mi’kmaq Tradition and British Druidry,” that I would like to read more of.
Amy Whitehead offered an illustrated version of her paper published recently in The Pomegranate, but in retrospect, it really belonged in our standalone session with the theme of “Idolatry.”
Yes, the I-word, sometimes subsumed in the broader term “materiality,” as in Graham Harvey’s presentation, “Materiality and Spirituality Aren’t Opposites (Necessarily): Paganism and Objects.”
The presentations were good, but of necessity just nibbled at the edges of topic, so I think that we will be having a session on “Idolatry Revisited” next year in Atlanta.
Our other session, “The Book and the Practice: The Relationship between Literature and Contemporary Paganism,” reflected one of my ongoing concerns–let’s move beyond citing the relationship between Stranger in a Strange Land and the Church of All Worlds and look at a broader range of “artistic representations … and their influence on and the mutually interdependent relations with a variety of Paganisms as they are practiced today,” to quote the language of the call for papers.
There is a lot more to do there too. At least we are not running out of ideas for conference sessions.
This Should Work for Freelancers, Too
From the Motor City Hoodoo line by Coventry Creations of Ferndale, Michigan.
Spices, Speak to Me
The Mistress of Spices
We ordered it from Netflix months ago, and it finally reached the top of our queue.
The whole movie is so stylized that it is more like a music video than a film. Artiness trumps story.
M. says it reminded her of Chocolat
Will the spices win out over earthly love? Three guesses.